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From the archives: Giving children tools to stretch their mindsBack to video

Some weeks ago, Mr. de Crevecoeur was taken to the Ross Memorial Pavilion to undergo an operation, from the effects of which he failed to rally.

Gazette, Tuesday, April 15, 1930

The Fraser Institute – today’s Fraser-Hickson Library – was bereft, and with it the readers of Montreal. Pierre de Crevecoeur, the institute’s chief librarian since 1901, was dead at the age of 68.

The city would have been a narrower place without him. Thanks in no small part to his efforts, the Fraser Institute was in the front rank of Montreal’s cultural life. Even had libraries been more numerous and favoured here, the institute would have been an ornament among them.

De Crevecoeur might never have become a librarian. He was born in Normandy and, after a Jesuit education, served four years on a French warship. Somehow, his shipmates persuaded him that his future lay not on the sea but as a landsman, farming in Canada. He duly acquired a farm near Compton but soon found rural life was not for him. Moving to Montreal, he taught French at the Fraser Institute and soon was working in the library itself.

The Fraser Institute was established through the bequest of a wealthy Montreal merchant, Hugh Fraser. There were bitter quarrels in the family over Fraser’s will following his death in 1870, and not for another 15 years would the library open. There had been libraries before in Montreal; the Fraser Institute, however, would be the first free, public one.

The institute was soon distinguished by the sheer number of books it held and the breadth of subjects they covered. So popular had it grown that, following the end of the war, its building at University and Dorchester streets was no longer adequate. For more than a year, until Dec. 16, 1927, its doors were closed to allow extensive remodeling.

The renovated building had an expanded main reading room, a magazine room, separate sections for the circulation and cataloguing staffs, vastly expanded stacks, and new lighting, furniture and other fixtures. On the ground floor where his office had been, it also had a new space to accommodate a long-standing dream of de Crevecoeur, a children’s library.

It would be the city’s first. There were shelves of children’s books; there were tables and chairs of suitable size; there was even a special sign on the door. Alas, that door was locked, for there was no money to pay a children’s librarian.

Enter Elizabeth Murray, a Montrealer whose love of reading matched her civic spirit. One day, while visiting de Crevecoeur, she learned of the locked room. She got in touch with the Montreal Local Council of Women, a lay service group, which set up a committee under its energetic convener of education, Maysie MacSporran. By early 1929, enough money had been raised – about $3,000 – to hire an experienced children’s librarian from Toronto, Violet McEwan.

The Montreal Children’s Library opened unofficially in June 1929, just in time to offer an oasis during the sweltering days of summer. “In apple-green surroundings, just the same delicious colour as the out-of-doors and quite as cool,” The Gazette wrote, “the young folk can rub shoulders with swaggering robber bands, fairy princesses and many of the most impressive characters of history.” The books “have been selected according to the strictest scientific standards of children’s library specialists,” which meant that boys could “turn contemptuously aside from anything ‘sissy’ and timid little girls do not have to resort to flamboyant tales of conquest.”

Dated though such standards seem now, they worked. “Evidently, the temptation to stay overtime is strong,” we went on, “for three of the younger generation who made a lengthy visit one afternoon arrived the next with an alarm clock – the symbol of discretion and parental authority.”

The formal opening came on Oct. 15 that year. There were the inevitable adult speakers, among them Montreal authors J. Georgina Sime and B.K. Sandwell. Sime said the library was not so much for born readers as for the countless number who would not think of reading were they not led to it. The love of reading, she added, is “a gift full of joys and riches.”

The adults in the audience all clapped respectfully. Also there to applaud, however, was a large group of children. They could look around and see more than 900 books on the shelves – and perhaps imagine all those that would follow. All it took to become a permanent member of the library, they were reminded, was five cents, a clean pair of hands and a promise “to take the best of care of the books I take out.”

Within just a month, membership grew to 208 children. The library was open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Saturday mornings McEwan held a story-telling hour “which promises to become a high light in juvenile activities in the city.”

Maysie MacSporran soon moved on to a library job in Ottawa, eventually returning to become principal of Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s School. Elizabeth Murray remained on the library board, until her death in 1961.

The building on Dorchester was demolished in 1957. The Fraser-Hickson moved on to an uncertain future in N.D.G. Despite occasional setbacks, it is still working hard to provide the city’s children – many having neither English nor French as mother tongue – with tools to stretch their minds. The library has four branches, deliberately sited in neighbourhoods without municipal libraries.

On Thursday evening [Apr. 22, 2004], the Montreal Children’s Library – still public, still largely financed privately – will mark its 75th anniversary with a fund-raising reception at the Atwater Club. Perhaps some will recall Georgina Sime’s words that evening in 1929. How long will the library continue to exist? “It depends,” she said, “on that powerful agent – money.”

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